Here is an experience of a kind that you could never even consider wanting to have. You probably won't ever want to have it again, but while it lasts, it is so bizarre as to certainly be worth having.
Goebbels has taken four obscure texts and comp
osed close harmonies for them, sung by male quartet the Hilliard Ensemble in a series of three modern tableaux created in complex detail on the stage.
The first of these tableaux is the black and white interior of a house with grey patterned wallpaper. Four men arrive on stage with all the sombre attitude of undertakers, and proceed to wrap up everything on the table which is centre stage, and put it into a huge box. All the while, a grandfather clock can be heard, but not seen.
Before unpacking another box and setting out its contents – nearly the same as before but with black and white reversed – they sing The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S.Eliot.
The second tableau is the facade of a modern house. Four men can be seen through the windows. They speak and sing a story by Maurice Blanchot called La folie du jour. They then gather outside the house and sing a fragment by Franz Kafka.
Rarely does Kafka seem so lightweight by comparison with what has gone before.
The really Kafka-esque moments come in the final tableau, however. In a bedroom in a grand hotel, four businessmen sing Samuel Beckett's weirdly rhythmic Westward Ho, with all its surreal repetitions and nonsense format.
The combination of music, texts and images provides a sensory overload, and while the addition of music and staging doesn't make the words any easier to understand, it opens them up to a new interpretation and leaves you wanting to read them, whether or not you have read them.
Run ends SaturdayThe full article contains 360 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
